Day 13: Advice For the Young at Heart, by Roy Williams

This was an interesting one to get into to start with, since there's rather a lot of "street" language used (and while I can understand and mimic accents I hear most of the time, I find reading dialect and slang a little harder to get my head round) and the duality of the time settings was a bit tricky to follow at first (though again, it's something that would have been far more evident from watching the play than from reading it).

The story arc wasn't quite what I was expecting though, and the punch at the end came as a pretty harsh blow. Actually possibly one which could have benefitted from being mentioned on the back, for potential trigger reasons, but then that'd give away the twist...

Difficult to know how to deal with that. On the one hand, it's possible that some of the audience might not be prepared to deal with the theme when out for an evening of theatre. But the entire point of having it in there to begin with is to make the audience deal with it, to go through the process, with Candice, of accepting what happened, and standing up and saying something about it. There's certainly potential for a really knockout performance, in spite of the play being quite short. It's aimed at kids, and I'm honestly not sure if that makes it better, or worse.

The interaction between the two timeframes, specifically the way it's only Sam and Candice who can see and hear each other across the gap, is very clever (if, again, a little confusing at first when reading. I'm sure this is yet another point which would become moot to see it performed)

All in all, it's an interesting insight into the times of each setting, and the story which plays out works very well within the concept of the play. It's inventive and well done.

Day 12: The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay

I absolutely loved this. I imagine it would be enhanced by knowing the tunes to the sung sections of the script, but the overall story had me giggling to myself in a lot of places. It's easy enough to see how this became so popular as a show (according to the notes it was played as a favorite by many different companies over the years) as it is accessible, funny and "stars" the characters normally seen as extras.

It's a little bit hard to comment on the satirical nature of the play, since I'm not all that familiar with the Italian Opera it was meant to send up, but even without such context I think most of the jokes hit home even today. The characters though, while "commoners" fulfil the same sort of types as any courtly setting in Shakespeare. Peachum takes the part of king, his daughter that same "wayward heir" type I keep coming back to (though, less so here - she intends to marry someone of her own chosing, which her parents don't seem to approve. Naturally he turns out to be a womaniser and a bit of a douche, but we don't know that to start with.

Even here, in a satirical comedy, there are long speeches in places... and of course, all of them spoken by men. Once again I find myself bemoaning the lack of really good female audition-length monologues just about anywhere.

I'm cutting this entry a little short as it's very late and I'm falling asleep at the wheel, as it were.

Day 11: The Crucible, by Arthur Miller

Once again, this is a play I came across first while I was at school. While I haven't looked at it in well over ten years, it's not strictly a first reading.

The first thing that really struck me on reading this (penguin modern classics version) was just how much Miller gives in the way of stage direction, historical anecdotes, even telling actors how they should be physically reacting and with what exact emotion. I've seen stage manager's cue copies with less annotation, and it doesn't leave much imagination up to the actors nor show any trust in a director. In context though, that does seem more relevant - every one of the characters is being "directed" (or misdirected), or play-acting, or at the very least hiding something significant. So perhaps the added sense of a somewhat over-directed script which might be natural responses to one actor but not to another could be used as a starting point for creating the atmosphere on stage. It doesn't strike me as an ideal way to work, but it might make an interesting experiment to try to follow the marks exactly as given in the script. There is also the note that a lot of the content of the play is taken or extrapolated from papers and records of the time, so in some scenes those directions might come out of transcripts (for example, of the courtroom).

The focus of the story changes so insidiously through the play that it's easy to forget by the end that the one person left alive after all the accusations was also the only person who actually had an act of "witchcraft" set against her at the beginning, Elizabeth Proctor. She is really the reason the whole situation spirals out of control in the first place, as the girls start accusing vast numbers of people (including her) to cover the fact that Abby wants her out of the picture. By the time Mary decides she wants to come clean it's far too late, both sides are in too deep to shift focus so quickly.

This play was meant to show a basic story at the heart of it which was recurring "out in the world" at the time - how damaging false accusations and misdirection can be, especially when it comes from the top. It's something which continues to be pertinent (and stretching back, shows up in Shakespeare just as often) and to an extent is part of being human. Even Elizabeth Proctor, the one who "cannot lie", tries to do so just a little bit to cover for her husband when put on the spot. Where the children in this play are all acting "big" (false as they may be, their emotions are writ large and directed to be played that way) the adults seem to all have fairly internalised directions - and there's always going to be worry about the younger generation having more will for freedoms (especially those they don't have a right to, for whatever reason) than the older... otherwise "in my day" wouldn't be cliché! Although in this case what they're trying to incite sort of backfires in the short-term, Miller notes in an afterword that parts of the town were left to ruin and the Theocracy in Salem was pretty much dead after the events of the play. So then, there's a different message to the younger audience members than there is to the old.

Day 10: Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare

I think I've found my gender-appropriate Shakespeare role. I really feel like I could get my teeth into playing Beatrice. Shame she seems to lack any sufficiently lengthy speeches for audition.

Moving on to a more general feeling of the play though. This is a familiar piece, and I know as a kid I engaged most with the comedies when it came to Shakespeare - well, I enjoyed them the most anyway. I don't think it was so much an issue of "boring Shakespeare" with the rest, so much as having grown up on cartoons and fantasy books, I had no interest in politics or complicated relationships... but this one has at least on the surface a funny story and reasonably easy to follow plots that are laid out pretty clearly. I found I remembered the Beatrice and Benedict thread to the play from previous readings/viewings, (according to the notes in the Cambridge Schools version which I've been working with today, the "original" part of the story, where the Claudio/Hero thread was a much older device which featured a lot in various older works) but not so readily the rest. I think that's likely to do with not really understanding the darker, more underhand and involved plotline when I was younger, or just ignoring it in favour of the funnier, lighter parts which seemed to be leading inexorably to a happy ending.

Reading with a more grownup eye, it's interesting to see how all of the different threads come together at the end, including the initially seemingly unconnected inept guard scene. (Clearly put in so that someone outside of the court actually gets to witness what's happened, and be unbound by conscience to any specific party and so be able to go and tell the "elders" involved what was going on.)

I think what keeps me focussed on the Beatrice and Benedict thread now is having been through a similar thing myself on a couple of occasions - friends, or in one case an apparently sworn enemy, have become boyfriends (the latter really stumped everyone who knew us... of course it didn't last and I'm not convinced at any point either of us would have called it love, but there was a certain amount of heel-snapping that went on before and afterwards). My current relationship certainly involved friends getting involved and trying to make us realise that we were pretty much the only ones who didn't "see it" and it was a shock to exactly nobody when the penny finally dropped. Bringing all those experiences into the character of Beatrice might make for a bit of a heady ride, but I don't think it's so close as to be one of those I'd have trouble getting out of, or dealing with the emotions.

Day 9: The Visitor, by Iain Crichton Smith

This is the third and final play of the Family triple-bill. A retiring teacher is visited by a former pupil (though he's not recognised as such) late at night. The younger man pretty much entirely fails to get to the point and eventually is kicked out at the point he starts trying to give a generous donation to the retirement fund.

As a play, it feels as though it's left hanging somewhat and nobody has really achieved anything. That said, it did send me rather forcefully back to my own English teacher, for whom I had 5 years of mutual hatred for apparently no reason at all. I still have issues and scars - I'm sure she was partly to blame for my loss of interest in reading as an adult, but perhaps it was a blessing in disguise, as it did lead to my working ever harder in Speech & Drama classes (which on occasional blissful terms took me out of *her* class!) and thus my drama crit saved me from a fate (well, grade) worse than a C in English Literature at GCSE. This teacher's response? "It just goes to show, doesn't it... how crap the rest of the country must be". She'll remain nameless, for her sake, but I wonder what she would make of this blog, and of my ongoing journey to becoming an actor. I don't know if she's even still around.

I don't think I could thank her for anything she taught me, and that's rare in a teacher (in all the wrong ways). From the age of 11 she mostly taught us that fantasy and sci-fi were worthless, that EVERYTHING is eventually about sex, and that anything she said was not to be questioned... and that those who didn't fit in were worthless too. My questions and comments when asked were so at odds to hers she at one point skimmed past my raised hand saying "I won't ask (her), she doesn't have a thought in her head".

And perhaps that's the point of the play - I imagine most people have a teacher who said something or did something once that made a huge impression, and we all wonder at some point whether we were remembered. I went back to visit both of my secondary schools a few years after I left each one, for different reasons... the class at CLSG who I had been a sort of form buddy to were now doing their GCSEs... and I was welcomed with a gaggle of hugs. Most of my teachers remembered me then, and I found the same at Mill Hill where I'd done my A-levels. For the latter I was even invited back to the staffroom, a thoroughly bizarre experience which left me spending almost an entire period talking to my German teacher in what was left of my language skills and almost not getting round all the physics teachers as I'd hoped to do (since I was nominally there to get some help and feedback on a final project for university).

Once again, I've responded to the play with anecdotes. Some plays really make you think about specifically what is happening on stage, the exact story they are telling, but this being open-ended allows the audience (or at least the reader) to think about the more general story, and their own.

Day 8: One Good Beating, by Linda McLean.

This was an intersting one for me, because it's the first of the short pieces I've worked with so far that really went on a deeply emotional journey in the text alone, allowing even a first reading to come to life. I've tagged this entry as personal development because I was really inspired to go on to do some emotional exploration, spurred on in large part because of this piece.

We open with an adult brother and sister discussing the feelings and situation that led to the fact that, currently, their father is locked in a coal shed. A shatteringly abusive childhood is revealed, in which the family seems to have been living together out of sheer force of will rather than any real love - about as broken as it could have been to still have everyone live under one roof.

This comes out in a series of mostly dialogues between each possible pairing of the three characters, with very little 3-way conversation going on, and in the end there's a sense of very little having been resolved, except possibly the complete breakdown of what little thread of love might have been left between any of them.

The character of Elaine is very interesting to me - while her brother and father readily show their vulnerability and mean streak respectiely, she really is wound up with a lot of conflicting emotions which threaten to come out throughout the play, and which she bites down on for the most part.

Weirdly the most chilling part of the whole play is going back and looking at the dedication... to the female playwrite's dead father. Write what you know? It would explain why the character of Elaine seems to be so much more deeply scarred and developed as a character just from the writing.

The personal development aspect of this came to me while walking out for the afternoon - I found myself really paying attention to everything around me (it was a route I'd not walked before). There was a girl who looked to be 8 or 9 taking a first run around the parking lots on new inline skates - I remember that feeling of not being quite sure I could trust my balance if I wasn't moving my legs with a walking gait - and connecting that back to the memory of being pushed on the swings that's mentioned in One Good Beating.

That sense of nostalgia would be one that would really jar - and it does in the play. Her father is trying to get an admission that she'd loved him at one point... and it's not long before she points out that this monster of a dad... beat her dog to death, by the sound of it. At first I thought he meant he'd hit it with a car, but having read through a couple of times, it's almost certainly something done by his own hands.

This could be a really interesting play to work with (no real monologues in there to be extracted for auditions, but it's something I'll be keeping an eye out for re-runs of at the Traverse) because it seems like a good introduction to some very emotional acting, where the lines dictate the tone quite consicely.

This has become a rather disjointed writeup and I think that may be because my feelings about it are too - it's well written and I want to engage with it on a deeper level than just reading, but at the same time you can't really like either of the male characters, the story is about as depressing as it could be and it ends with a sense that nothing will ever be OK again. And I'm really not sure how I feel about all that, taken together.

Day 7: Saturday is Skills Day!

Judging by how tired I was getting towards the end of the first week, I decided to nominate Saturday as a skills day - no new script work, allowing a little more time to focus on guitar practice, singing, talking to a camera, and so on.

I set my goal pretty high - I wanted to take a speech I know well, and then pretty much rip it apart.. on camera... "directors from hell" style. It turns out, I'm kind of terrified of talking to the camera. Acting like a tit on film? Not a problem... as long as I'm not paying attention to the camera. I love having my photo taken too. I've got plenty of songs up on Souncloud, available to the public, so it's clearly not a problem with being *heard* either. I have no idea why I'm so shy of actually putting my voice and image together. So that particular plan fell through. I did do some nattering on the camera, a sort of first draft of facing my various gremlins and then responding to them. I'll be going over that at some point and possibly patching it together into a video. If I do, I'll link it here, though it may be a while if I decide to redo it with a tighter script (and a bit more emoting when I'm being the gremlins!)

..And then there was the Doctor Who special. I remembered spotting a youtube video on developing emotional range which suggested watching films in a more open posture and really letting yourself feel everything. So while I was in the cinema rather than at home alone, I did just that - any time I was holding my breath, I tried to breathe, and as far as possible kept my arms out to my sides (premier seating for the win!) The result? Utterly vibrating with a lot of emotions I've not really felt in a while, and a few new favorite lines!

So all in all, I did spend a good chunk of the day feeling like I hadn't achieved much and that dispite being my own project, for which I make the rules, I was somehow cheating by giving myself a "day off". But the fact of it is, once I relaxed and let myself just absorb what opportunities were there, I found myself remembering, opening up, and learning. This is meant to be a journey and I don't need to be perfect all the time. As I get more secure in myself, this will all start to come more easily.

It's been a long time since I looked up at the stars, really properly. And all three of my favorite constellations are hanging up there tonight, the three my dad taught me to recognise when I was six. And I think I kinda felt like I was back there again.

Day 6 - Acts, by Riccardo Galgani

This is the first of three plays from a triple-bill which debuted with the Traverse Theatre Company here in Edinburgh in 1999 entitled Family. Aside from being the first I knew about the theatre which is still an active hub for new work and young writers, the play itself is something rather different to anything I've really come across before.

When I was at school and doing Speech & Drama lessons and exams, we looked at Shakers (among other things) as a recent/contemporary piece, and I remember mostly hating it, and the rest. The characters seemed so shallow. I was never allowed to watch soap operas at home (Mum didn't see the point in them, and I had very little interest in any case) and I saw those plays as an extension of the genre. Acts, on the surface seems to be a similar sort of uncomfortable snapshot of every day life, this time with much older characters. The old mum seems to be not so much dying by degrees as fading away into the obscurity of dementia so fast I spent most of the reading expecting her to die onstage while the other characters were momentarily distracted doing something else.

The second reading included more carefully reminding myself of the specific stage direction at the beginning of the play - when the grown-up son in the piece gets up to move around, he must always come back to a seat with his back to the audience. Presumably having a back wall for acoustics would make this viable, but it's an interesting direction. My lasting impression of the first reading was very much that we should be sort of seeing things from his perspective, and indeed if he's sitting with his back to us, it's the other faces we'll be watching.

The title itself is rather vague at first, but it is subtlely accurate - all three (mother, father, son) are putting on acts for each other. Dad clearly feels his age, and is concerned for his wife but doesn't want to show it, particularly around his son. As for the son, it's mentioned repeatedly that he's not visited his parents in 12 years, and he dodges the question of why for most of the play, until he's finally asked a direct question - how's the wife and kids... and he simply answers "I don't know". For that alone, there's a wealth of the story that we're not being told, and maybe he's come here hoping to talk about that, and decided not to when he sees how his own (original) family unit has drifted over the years. And then the wonderful moments where each parent presses money on their son while the other is out of the room, which is so touchingly true. (I remember my grandparents and my parents arguing over who was paying for dinner when I was younger.)

I'd like to see this performed, if I get the chance. It seems like there's far more to be given away to an audience between the lines than can be gathered just from reading, and many different ways it could be interpreted.

Day 5: Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (RSC film adaptation starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart)

In order to get the most out of a film adaptation, it's worth taking into account everything the DVD has to offer - in this case, I watched the film through once in it's entirety, then watched the production documentary, and finally rewatched with the director ocmmentary turned on.

While there are some big names in the lead roles, I found myself drawn to the character of Rosencrantz, though I'll admit I'm not sure if that's because the actor looks rather disarmingly like someone I know. Naturally being an RSC production the entire cast is necessarily comfortable with making the language feel natural - the setting was modernised and I noticed some extra not quite verbal vocalisations which I'm not sure were in the script but serve to help the flow of the lines feel more up to date.

My thoughts yesterday about the wayward heir as a trope or archetype in Shakespeare was somewhat vindicated in the commentary - it was mentioned that a lot of these plays were being written during a time when the succession to the throne out in the real world was in question, along with the effect certain options might have. So that tells me perhaps one of the options was a young prince, treated as any normal youth of the day by his friends and openly out in the world rather than shut up at court, and the potential death of the king by various means was being used as a testing ground in a lot of these plays.

Not just the death of the king though - in this play once again the death toll is at least half the main players, and suicide used as a way out of awkward situations. In light of these being commentary on the day, using suicide as a sort of excuse for those in court not outwardly taking responsibility for their mistakes - Oh, I'm sure inside they are wracked with guilt and literally dying of it... except these are not comedies. If someone today staged a play where some of the major world leaders who've recently been seen to fuck up in all kinds of interesting ways suddenly being remorseful behind closed doors and sucking a bullet for it... they'd get a standing ovation, or arrested for treason. Or both. It'd be nice to think that the advice I was given by an older girl at school would hold here - I'd come into rehearsals one day, aged about 12 and close to tears from a day of relentless teasing over whatever it was that day... and she didn't know me that well, we were maybe a week into rehearsing and she'd not seen me before that. But she sat me down in the wings and told me, "you're safe here. On stage, no-one can touch you". And perhaps it's true of playwrites too - and maybe that's what he's getting at by (several times) including a daring, plot-revealing, accusatory and life-reflecting play within a play. I never thought of it that way before, but it could be taken as sort of dick-waving for his own audacity in dealing with thinly-veiled issues of the day.

Day 4: Anthony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare

This ended up being a late night (as I start to write this, it's 12:40am) but as tired as I was from having been out most of the afternoon, ploughed on and finished what I'd set myself to do. It's far too early in the project to let things slide, and this did turn into something of a battle of wits at the end. However, brief thoughts on my first reading:

There are a lot of characters introduced at various stages in the play, and it got a bit tricky to keep track of them all while tired... but the title characters I found myself quite drawn to (even if EVERYBODY did commit suicide - seriously, what's the obsession with that? Anyone would be forgiven for being absolutely certain that nobody of note died in Shakespeare's day that wasn't in a duel, or by suicide) and I will certainly be revisiting this, since Cleopatra interests me as a character. She is one of the stronger women I've come across in Shakespeare's work, and has some interesting conversations with her entourage. The love between her and Anthony is one that I think could be played in several ways - genuine on both parts, feigned on either... I think his for her is genuine, though he's clearly a bit of a womaniser (a trait Shakespeare really doesn't shy from, wonder why that could be...) he does seem to hold Cleopatra in higher regard than his other conquests (and wives). That could just be an act though, to keep sweet the mother of his heirs, for all the good that does either of them in the end, depending on how certain lines are read and directed.

I've started to observe a certain archetype (which I don't think is technically a traditional one, but it crops up a lot in Shakespeare's plays, and elsewhere) which is the childish/hedonistic heir, who has the threat or promise of power and responsibility but has not come into it yet - and when he does, generally is destined to get talked about either for a sudden change in ways, or for the lack of it. Anthony seems to fit into the aftermath of this, he's referred to by Caesar as a bit of a party animal, and later follows Cleopatra away from a fight and then gets into a bit of a strop over the whole thing - he seems to be a rather complicated mix of respected leader (under Cleopatra's shoe, to varying extents through the play) and so much still driven by the conviction that feasting and marrying are the best ways to solve problems. Sounds like a fun way to run a kingdom, but rather a lousy way to win a war... and when both women and war threaten his position, he does the only sane thing and tops himself. Of course. So all in all, I'm left not entirely sure who we're meant to like, feel sorry for, and so on. I kind of want to side with Cleopatra on the whole affair, but she's taking great joy tying him up in knots just as much as he's bringing it upon himself. I'm pretty sure this isn't meant to be a comedy, but it wouldn't be a stretch to turn it into a farce just to bring a little levity to the fact there's at least 5 suicides. And at least 2 more deaths.

Day 3: A Doll's House, by Henrik Ibsen

For most of the play, I found myself uncomfortably disliking the chracter of Nora, but being drawn in because she reminded me of some of the traits I like least in myself. She wears a mask around those who love her, talks too much with people who don't want to listen and too little with people who do, and has this awful dichotomy of desperately wanting to look out for herself while hiding what she's done for someone else (but under dubious circumstances) to the point where it can no longer be managed when it emerges. The characters around her are mostly remarkably understanding, apart from her husband, who is a dick.

OK, that's the short version.

I read Nora aloud as I went through, and as much as I found myself understanding the character as a bit of a horrific reflection of myself, I did also find that even cold-reading came very easily. I did find myself commenting part way through that I don't think I would be comfortable playing Nora to a crowd, at least not for more than a short while. I feel that a big part of getting into the skin of another character involves sort of switching control over to a new part of my brain, but Nora seems driven by things that are emotionally very close to home for me.

The promise of being able to distance myself from a character afterwards makes it a lot easier to really let that character feel her emotions and give a good performance. I find it in LARP quite often, I will come home utterly drained but after a good sleep and reconnecting with the real world, I can leave the character behind even when it's one I return to often. I played a character a few years ago, for a couple of seasons, who I based on my own understanding of my inner child. Threw as much sugar and caffeine down my neck as I could and went for it. It was enourmous fun, but I really struggled to get out of her headspace afterwards and would sometimes still be talking in the character's accent for days afterwards. The effect was impressive - most of the people I've spoken to afterwards about it told me they found the character to be believable, well played, fun to interact with... and capturing that kind of energy every time is only going to be possible if I can snap out of it again afterwards.

Bio questions, November '13

Ok. Periodically, I'll revisit those basic and horribly tricky questions that utterly stumped me last time round, but which I'm already giving considerable thought to. I fully anticipate these will change and develop over the next year or so, but it'll be interesting to look back and track that.

Who am I? I'm a 30-something child at heart. I tread a fine line between introvert and extrovert - I love spending time with friends, particularly playing board games or roleplaying (or just takeout and a movie with a few awesome people) and I miss those few close friends I have terribly if I go too long without at least chatting online. But I definitely need to recharge alone. I've heard the phrase "social introvert" used and that's probably about right. Pretty much all of my hobbies are creative in some way, I'm a tremendous gamer geek and have in the last few years started going to a couple of gaming conventions (small compared to the American ones, but there's one I get to every year now where I've started doing cosplay, which I've realised is pretty much free reign to play those characters I might never otherwise have the chance to do (I was Rafiki, with the stage facepaint and a fallen branch from the local park, this year... but any version of the show and/or costume shots I've seen suggest I have rather the wrong colouring to ever land the part, not to mention only having a halting and terribly-accented smattering of swahili) and the opportunity to have a lot more interaction with my "audience" than I ever did on stage at school - we were never allowed to be seen by the audience in our costumes off stage. I remember being absolutely captivated as a kid the first time I saw Cats and the bar area was quite literally crawling with costumed characters.

What do I want out of training? (note: some of this I'm intending to address over the coming year!) As much as I enjoy shakespeare and musicals, I have had a bit of a blind spot for modern plays, as well as the historical Shakespeare plays. From an acting point of view I'd like to learn to open up more easily - practicing at home I can get quite self-conscious of "what the neighbours think" if I were to project properly! The same feeling can mean I'm physically "smaller" with my emotions than I want to be when acting. It's come out once or twice, that I've really been able to let go and just give a good performance and I want to be able to do that every time. So mostly: exposure to more range of material (and learning to appreciate it), and opening up more emotionally to give a good performance.

What are some specific aspirations? Due to a very long standing love-hate relationship with A Midsummer Night's Dream, I'd love to direct it one day. I've got a lot to learn before I get there, but it would bury a lot of ghosts for me. I've read rumours of one of Anne McCaffrey's books being made into a film (Dragonriders of Pern) - it's actually her other books that I loved as a child (particularly the Tower and Hive series, and Crystal singer, and the Dragondrums trilogy) - if any of those got made into a movie eventually that'd be great to get involved in.

If you have questions to suggest I use the next time I do one of these, leave them in the comments!

Day 2: Dinosaurs, by Richard Nathan

This was a script I found while browsing titles on Simply Scripts (among other things, there are a large number of Shakespeare scripts linked from there, all links are to free online sites) described as "full length" and "scifi" and not much else. I decided to indulge my nerdy side and give it a go.. not realising yet that it was only a short sketch. There's very little character development and it's more of a protracted story-style joke than a dramatic piece, but this entire endeavour being about challenging myself in new ways, I was determined to find something to get out of it rather than dismiss it out of hand as "cheating". Thus, it being a short piece and having someone handy to read with me, decided to actually go through it aloud and acted rather than just reading it.

First impressions, it flows a lot better read outloud than it does on paper, something my friend agreed with right away. By the end of the first reading it was clear what the lesson was today - not corpsing at the punchline. Something very basic, but also something I've had a bit of a weakness with in certain circumstances. Enough so that I ran a workshop one week in my drama society at uni on the subject, and there's even now the memory of a single line I had to respond to in my largest role to date which was always delivered so well the only way to get through it on the night was to grit my teeth so hard on my response that projection became an issue.

However, the second run through I was getting off the page more, and that helped a lot, and was able to keep playing straight through by focussing on the next line - being dismissive rather than a particularly emotive line helps a lot as well. It's something I've noticed, thinking back, in gag reels it's often very contrasting emotions or ridiculous situations that lead to corpsing, and that dismissing the joke in character makes it easier to also dismiss the need to laugh at it.

Day 1: The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.

I chose this one to start because it was on the suggested audition piece list for Birmingham School of Acting - one of the schools I went for last time and *nearly* made, and I'll admit right now is probably my first choice still. I'd never read any Elizabethan-era material that wasn't Shakespeare before today, so it felt like a little bit of a stretch and challenge.

My first impression was what felt like over-use of contracted words, which made reading a stumbling affair. I hadn't actually realised 'em as a shortened form of Them wasn't a modern thing, so it felt a bit awkward. As I got into my stride and was able to start to draw the story out the text, I gradually began to see pretty much every trope of Shakespeare... almost as if he were being sent up somewhat. We have disguised infiltrators, murder fuelled by loving the wrong person, a ghost who makes a 10-second cameo and is never seen again, secret lovers committing suicide in front of their families... it goes on. Even the final line is an echo of the closing of A Midsummer Night's Dream, after we saw earlier in the play a poet gone mad reciting lines which could easily be paraphrasing of the same.

However, Pixar-like allusions aside, my intent had been to get into the head of the character suggested, which is Beatrice. She is a surprisingly deep character who I defintely felt like I could sympathise with, and would be more than willing to play. She's hasty with her heart and a bit gullible. In a modern setting she'd probably be played up to look like a bit of a ditsy blonde. She's obviously got a bit of a mean streak given how quickly she agrees to let Deflores kill someone on her behalf just to get out of an arranged marriage. But under all that she's got some intelligence, sneakiness and stubbornness to her character. Her lengthy confession death along with Deflores was a little sudden and unclear on first reading - leave comments if you've read this and can shed some light on what was going on there!

I will almost certainly revisit this, I'd enjoy seeing it performed and once I have, will likely go back to the script to start working on some character development for Beatrice as a possible audition piece.

Welcome to Play a Day!

I've tried before to get into Drama School. It was largely promising until eventually one let-down was just a bit *too* unfairly personal and I lost my nerve. That was about 5 years ago. I've learned a lot since then, and while I didn't think I'd be coming back to the game, something snapped. I was in recovery from surgery to fix a ruptured disc when I discovered the Hollow Crown series. I've never engaged with the History plays before. And then something wonderful happened. Jeremy Irons slapped Tom Hiddleston, and I felt the slap. It told me, "What have you been doing all these years? NOTHING. Wasting valuable time you should have been doing the only thing you've ever cried at losing." So. I'm back on the horse, so to speak. From now, through 2014 and into the start of 2015 I'll be reading, watching or otherwise engaging with an entire play, every day. I can revisit plays within that time, as long as I get something new out of it (for example, reading something, and then perhaps a few weeks or months later watching it on stage, maybe at some other point browsing film adaptations to see how the script and acting changes... but I can't just rewatch one film over and over just because it's got eye candy in the lead role!) I have started a facebook group (playaday2014) which will contain links to the scripts (if they are available online) or places to buy books/films/tickets, and brief interjectory comments through the day. At the end of each day I'll come back here and post a more coherant account of what I've observed, learned and felt. There may also be some reviews, links, long term objectives and such, and they will be tagged appropriately. Without further ado, grab a cuppa and a script and put those feet up lest you break a leg. ;)